Quick test. Which of the following were acts of terrorism:

[Truth2Tell]

Provocative and informative column from the Daytona Beach News-Journal. Tristam is always a treat.

'Islamists' come late to a practice West has long justified for itself
By Pierre Tristam

Quick test. Which of the following were acts of terrorism: a) Al-Qaida's bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors; b) Hezbollah's raid on an Israeli military patrol in July 2006, killing three soldiers and capturing two, and triggering a 34-day war; c) The Hamas ambush last week of an Israeli patrol on the Gaza border, killing one Israeli soldier; d) Attacks on American troops in Iraq, which have killed about 3,500 soldiers (not including some 800 nonhostile deaths); e) None of the above.

The answer is (e) -- none of the above. It may be impossible to agree on a single definition of terrorism. It's easier to agree on what terrorism isn't. Attacking military personnel or military installations isn't terrorism. It's an act of war. This definition would hold even according to the U.S. Code, which states: "The term 'terrorism' means an activity that involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure and appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking."

Civilians are the common denominator. But neither government nor the press follows that definition. They have no definition. They improvise according to prejudice and expediency. As Caleb Carr, author of "The Lessons of Terror" (2002) noted, "almost every agency of the U.S. government that deals with the threat of terrorism maintains its own definition of that phenomenon. More surprising still, among these definitions, no two are identical or even, in some cases, easy to reconcile with one another. The same phenomenon applies to America's academic and intellectual communities." The nonsensically named "war on terror" is supposedly the central conflict of our time. Yet as a nation we don't agree or even discuss much what "terrorism" really is.

It's ignorance by necessity. There is no way to have an honest discussion of terrorism without quickly discovering that "Islamists" are among its most recent and rather selective practitioners, while Westerners have been its more systematic enthusiasts and euphemists. Any reading of Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Carter G. Woodson, Frederick Douglass (among other black voices) and, obviously, innumerable slave narratives, clarifies why Cornel West derided the notion that the 9/11 attacks brought terror to "the homeland." Terror -- systematic, state-sponsored, genocidal -- was the daily bane of black existence until a few decades ago.

More at:

http://www.news-journalonline.com/ColEssays.htm

[progressoid]

1. Very, very good.

[Usrename]

2. Kyle Lieberman Ammendment - another new use of the term

(b) Sense of Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate--

(5) that the United States should designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, as established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and initiated under Executive Order 13224; and

http://iranlegislation.wikispaces.com/space/showimage/Amendment+3017.doc

[Truth2Tell]

3. Evidently Chavez may qualify soon as well. nt

[DutchLiberal]

4. Thanks, that was insightful. K&R!

It isn't being discussed because we don't want to face the reality that we, the West, have been terrorizing the whole world for the last four -or fivehunderd years. And anybody who does open his mouth, is being shut down as 'unpatriotic', 'terrorist-hugger' or is said to have the so-called 'white man syndrome', a term conservatives left and right have coined with which they mean you are condemning your own people's wrongdoing over-proportionally out of guilt. (And it is meant to dismiss all criticism with a nice easy label.)